I often end up using my laptop while laying on a couch or a bed, with the laptop sitting in front of me directly on a fabric surface. Since the air intake is at the bottom - it gets completely obstructed, and the laptop heats up more than it needs to and drains the battery faster.
I would love to see an Input Cover option with a vent for air intake, to allow the laptop to suck in air from the top too.
Citation needed 
Maybe in business settings. For personal use though, laptops sit on an awful lot of flat surfaces. Blankets, pillows, even your lap is not flat when it comes to an air intake like this. For the 14" at least, the air intake is only really the left hand side (where the fan is), which is the bit that is pressed down on the not flat part of your left leg.
Anyway, I don’t think a top air intake is necessarily a great idea, but I do agree the bottom intake design is bad. It’s the worst part of the laptop, by far.
You ain’t getting much use of passive convection if your height delta is 1cm
It seems pretty sensible to me, there are a lot of laptops with top intake. Dust gets it either way, so I’m cleaning any of my laptops regularly. And the risk of a liquid spill is much further down on my priority list than not having the cooling system suffocate in a scenario that happens every day for multiple hours.
Also, do note that I’m not saying that your laptop should have a top intake. I just want to have an option to make my laptop have a top intake.
Sorry, I have a radically different approach to devices than you. I tweak and mend them to suit my needs, not the other way around.
If I wanted to bend myself backwards just to use a computer I’d probably still be using some macbook